juliet, naked

Once upon a time, you would watch a Nick Hornby movie and then turn on your computer, make a playlist, start a blog, go for a cup of coffee with a boy you were sort seeing, except it was all a game. You would smoke cigarrettes indoors, leislurely, in a way that today seems preposterous. You would feel wordly about your tastes, discuss Love and Relationships in pop-culture metaphors (Finding Love was Like Looking for the Perfect Pair of Sneakers) and then drive to the cinema. Twice in the same week, once all by yourself. You would fuck on weeknights until your perfect young body ached, the insides of your arms bitten mad, your legs absolutely sore. Your life, relationship, conflict could all be summed in a song or two. You would feel butterflies in your stomach when you heard the first five seconds of those two songs. You would text at three am in the morning, drunk. You would be up and drunk at three am in the morning. You would whisper invitations in someone's ear at a bar. Then leave the bar like there was no tomorrow. You knew no life outside of this but had the firm belief that This Was Not It. It Would Be Grand. Your life, that is.

These days, you pick up a bright yellow Nick Hornby book and read it on the flight home. You usually use those flights to catch up on work, or to read last month's New Yorker and maybe sip a bit of wine. This time you didn't feel like it. You picked up the bright book yesterday on the airport and you couldn't put it down until this morning, all three hundred and some odd pages of it. Feeling old and wasted.